This is an application to establish the Research Center for Black Mental Health at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. The overall objective of this proposed Center is to foster high quality scholarly and empirical research on mental health and illness in black populations. This application builds upon nearly fifteen years of concerted effort by faculty and students to empirically investigate the nature of, and responses of Americans of African heritage to, systemic, interpersonal, and intra-psychic sources of serious personal problems. During the course of this research we have been fortunate in developing a knowledgeable group of research personnel and attracting to the university a large n umber of faculty and graduate students with interests in the study of mental health and mental illness in black populations. The proposed research center will: 1) facilitate the integration of multiple perspectives across disciplines that are needed to focus on the nature of mental functioning and disorders among African Americans; 2) provide the resources and opportunities for the synthesis and development of intellectual and research products; and 3) foster the training and experience of minority researchers and students. The proposed center will contain three components: an Administrative core designed to facilitate intellectual interchange, training and overall coordination; a research project on serious personal problems, coping and utilization of informal and formal help, based upon a fourth wave of new data collection and analyses on respondents from the original 1979-1980 National Survey of Black Americans; and, an extensive pilot research effort, in cooperation with the Detroit Psychiatric Institute, on the role of racial factors in the diagnoses of mental disorders.